


Winter Bites With Its Teeth or Lashes With Its Tail

by dragonofdispair, Rizobact



Series: Transformers Fantasy AU Novels/Novellas [11]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Biology, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - No War, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Dragonformers/Long Patrol/Barbarian AU, Dragons, Feral Behavior, Gen, It’s an AU blender!, No Sex, but there is cuddling, dragonformers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact
Summary: It’s Jazz’s turn to scout out over the northern wastes beyond the Wall, checking for any sign of wild cannibal dragons. It’s a long flight, but one taken in the depths of winter when there’s no atmosphere to leech heat away from a flying dragon, and he’ll be back long before he tires.Prowl, one of those “wild cannibal dragons”, is on the Long Patrol. He’s not looking for invaders; he’s just caring for his nests full of the eggs the rest of his tribe built.
Series: Transformers Fantasy AU Novels/Novellas [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/757134
Comments: 102
Kudos: 93





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Long Patrol](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619061) by [WandersUnderStarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WandersUnderStarlight/pseuds/WandersUnderStarlight). 



> I wrote a teaser for this one for my AU August Dealer’s Choice prompt. You don’t have to read it to understand this story, but if you missed it, and are curious, it’s right [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25660675/chapters/63820924). We’re finally posting the fuzzy!dragonformers! :D:D:D ~dragon

Before we start, here are some dragon! Prowl and Jazz pics. :D Jazz is the scruffy one with the tufts of fur and Prowl is the one who is fuzzy all over. 

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Janky sketches by dragonofdispair

Marker and colored pencil drawing by Rizobact

Character models courtesy of Flight Rising

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Small, metallic kobold claws _click-clicked_ across Jazz's plating as they finished cinching the titanium armor chestplate and other pieces of his suit into place. The armor even included additional wing plating, something he'd never consider wearing in any season but winter. They were way too bulky, impeding his ability to actually generate lift with his wings. Warm, flowy, matching silver microfiber cloth draped over his waist and hind legs. It was heavy here, inside the tower, but once he left the airlock it would behave as light as silk. 

He was looking forward to the flight and to finishing it in equal measure. The frozen winter wasteland was beautiful, and flying over it was a chance to stretch his wings even if they weren’t of any actual use while the atmosphere covered the ground in a crystallized blanket of snow, but there was a reason everyone remained in the underground complexes during the longest season. Nothing could survive long on the surface in the unrelenting cold.

Except, somehow, the beasts they patrolled for throughout the winter.

The last kobold finished combing his decorative mane of plastic fur and left the preparation area and Jazz shivered. The Wall had been built to keep the savages in the north _out,_ but without the patrols they still sometimes managed to gather into a group and attack the more civilized dragons. Or even just claw their way into the underground cities and start eating things! Jazz had never seen one, but he’d heard the stories, read the records. Instead of retreating underground like sensible creatures, they spent the long, airless winter roaming the surface until they were mad with hunger… and they especially liked kobolds. 

Jazz wasn’t one of those who credited their tiny, wingless kin with all that much intelligence but that didn’t mean he wanted to see them eaten by fuel-mad dragons!

But he needed to stop acting like this was his first patrol and get on with it. Ricochet had flown this same route a rotation ago and everything had been fine.

Ready as he would ever be, he stepped into the airlock and closed it behind him. It started cycling, pumping the warm tower air out so that it, and the heat it contained, wouldn’t be wasted, leaving behind an airless vacuum. 

It wasn’t _cold._ That was one of the things that always surprised him. Airlessness was its own kind of insulator. But it wasn’t warm either, and eventually his heat would radiate away. 

Best get this over with then.

Cycling up his antigravs, Jazz made sure he could pick up all four of his feet without wobbling before running forward and leaping from the tower, letting his momentum carry him as far as it could before he engaged his microthrusters. They made no noise in the vacuum, of course, but Jazz felt them vibrate through his struts. The winter silence was absolute.

Oh, but the sky! Jazz tilted his head to take in the stars. There were so many, so many sparkling points of light spread out above him in the winter darkness. It was a real treat to see them after staring up at cave ceilings for so long. One of those stars was their sun, a pinprick like any other at this distance. It was only sensible to retreat underground, where the geothermal generators could heat trapped air and keep everyone warm and comfortable, but it was a truth renewed every spring: dragons were not meant to be cooped up inside. Jazz let himself indulge in the view and the pure sensation of flight for a moment before turning his gaze back to the tundra below.

Now, in deep winter, the entire atmosphere was frozen into icy snow and Jazz could only see the barest suggestion of the landscape beneath. With nothing but starlight to reflect back at him, the drifts of oxygen and nitrogen (the last gasses to freeze as Cybertron traveled further and further from its star) snow only sparkled dimly, a shadowy expanse of pale white and blue under the void. Beautiful, but it was impossible to see any savage, fuel-mad dragons against it on the visual spectrum. Jazz was looking for infrared signatures. The snow was so cold even the barest trace of heat would shine like a beacon.

There was nothing on the near side of the ridge. Jazz knew when he flew over it and angled his flightpath further north, giving him a line of sight to the other side. Nothing popped out at him in particular, though there was something about the expanse up ahead that just seemed… off. 

He sent a quick radio ping to the others at the Wall that he was going to check it out and fired his microthrusters to send him in that direction. It was a little bit beyond the charted path of his patrol, but if something was happening, if the savages were invading, his superiors would want to know about it. 

It didn’t really look like anything as he got closer. There weren’t any concentrated thermal spikes, the sort that would indicate a gathering of wild dragons, and the snow wasn’t disturbed either, but something still struck him as odd. It took until he was right over it before he realized what it was: the ground was warm. Warmer than the rest of the ground he’d flown over, warmer than it should have been. That wasn’t righ—

He hadn’t even had a chance to wheel away before the snow below boiled away, sublimating instantly over whatever was making that heat. Currents and eddies of angry, cold air tossed him this way and that while lighting fried his sensors. Deaf and blind, Jazz _felt_ the shockwave, a violent surge. An explosion. A roar.

Then he felt himself falling, a split second before he felt nothing at all.

He woke pinned down under a heavy weight, partially submerged in some sort of liquid, with teeth pulling at the gaps in his suit of armor, gnawing wetly at the straps.

No! Nononono, it was trying to eat him! Jazz thrashed ineffectually, pushing at the mass above him with feet and tail as the lack of atmosphere rendered his frantic shouts inaudible. He felt a vibration from the creature on top of him. A growl? He couldn’t tell. He splashed and clawed but the liquid turned the rocks slippery. The creature only repositioned itself and continued to gnaw its way through his armor. 

Panicking and pinned was not a good way to get a clear view of whatever those really-not-okay-and-entirely-too-close-to-his-plating teeth belonged to. Jazz’s processor was having trouble getting any farther than “big” and “terrifying” in the face of his imminent demise, but he did register when his tail struck something soft. Fur?

He couldn’t hear it when the straps finally broke, but it still felt like the _snap!_ echoed through his entire frame. The extra plates he’d put on to protect himself fell away. Nooooo!

He couldn’t tell if he was screaming or sobbing; probably both, for all the good either did. Desperate, he sent out a distressed ping over comms. The signal barely made it a couple of feet before breaking up and scattering.

The creature tossed the armor away somewhere behind it. Then the pinning weight was gone. 

Immediately, Jazz tried to run.

He struggled up out of the liquid, which rapidly froze into a thick layer of ice across his plating, making him go weak and numb. So cold! He’d never actually touched Cybertron’s icy surface before and it… he couldn’t describe the sheer, utter _cold…_

Jazz saw a bare flash of red horns as a mass of white fur and snarling fangs bodily shoved him back into the liquid. The ice coating his frame weakened and broke up before melting away completely in what now felt like the incredible warmth of whatever he was floating in. He was tempted to shrink down deeper into it. There was impossible cold and a giant monster out there! A giant monster that glared at him a klik longer, then — seemingly satisfied that Jazz wouldn’t try to run again — paced away to paw through some rocks. 

Now Jazz finally got a good look at it. His impression of a mass of fur and teeth had been partially accurate, but the creature was actually dragonlike in shape, with unfurred plating making up its distal wing membranes, a thickly furred tail, enormous claws, and razor-sharp fangs and bits of armor and a drape of furry cloth over its hind legs… It definitely was a dragon, but one like nothing Jazz had seen before. It was mostly white, though all that fur glinted and shone oddly in the dim… _eerie_ red-orange glow that actually lit the cave. 

A savage dragon. 

A real one.

Jazz shrank back, scrabbling along the edge of the pool to the far side to put what little distance he could between them. The dragon looked at him, the seemingly permanent snarl on its face dripping with menace. Then it looked back to the rocks and picked up a sealed, round… thing… which it started to bring back over to Jazz, circling to herd him back to the part of the pool where he’d woken up. 

When Jazz had edged back again, it sat down and opened up the round thing. Inside, Jazz could clearly see the bright, iridescent pink glow of energon. With one clawed and armored paw, it pushed the container closer to Jazz. 

Scared and confused and finally beginning to feel the toll his exertions and the explosion (storm? stormplosion?) had taken on him, Jazz just clung to the edge of the pool and stared.

The fur on the savage ruffled, unbothered by the silvery icicles clinging to it. It pushed the container of energon right up next to Jazz. 

The color was pure and clear. He couldn’t smell it now, of course, but if it was the same as the energon he was familiar with — and it certainly looked like it was — it probably had the same scent. Where had it come from? How did a savage dragon have refined fuel?

The furred dragon’s tail lashed as it watched Jazz just stare at the energon. 

_“What do you want?”_ Jazz tried his comms again, hoping for a better result than his wordless panic ping.

There was no response. It watched him for a klik longer, then ruffled its fur again before beginning to groom the ice off. 

Was it ignoring him, or not receiving him? Whatever the walls were made of was very unfriendly to comm signals; everything Jazz tried to send beyond them broke up when it hit them, but the ones he sent at the wall of fur just… stopped. None of his test signals got a response either, and Jazz fought back the hysterical and possibly suicidal impulse to try insulting it.

The savage looked back at him and tilted its head, fierce snarl still affixed there. It padded forward across the icy rocks, and Jazz cowered down into the pool. But all it did was lick the open container of energon, then give Jazz a significant Look before moving away again. This time it went to the other end of the pool, where it started checking on… something. 

While it was busy over there, Jazz finally risked going for the fuel. It didn’t make any sense for the thing to feed him when it was just going to eat him, but until he was actually eaten he needed energon. The pool was exponentially warmer than the ground just beyond it, but not warm enough to sustain him on its own. He still needed to produce his own heat if he didn’t want to wind up slowly sinking into a torpor and dying.

It _tasted_ like simple, clean energon. Likely solar distilled, though there was a faint aftertaste that was nothing at all like the fuel his own people made. 

Meanwhile, the dragon moved on from checking the things in the… whatever the liquid in this pool was — molten gallium, maybe? — and moved on to fussing with the lights. The eerily glowing rocks. Nudging them minutely closer or further away from the pool. Several were even partially submerged. 

Curiosity warred with self-preservation. Then the scary dragon turned its scary face back toward him and Jazz decided he Did Not Care what was up with the rocks. He gulped down the last of the energon and sank up to his head so only his optics and the horns on his forehead were exposed.

The dragon came over and almost daintily retrieved the container. 

Then, while Jazz watched, it drew a line in the rock and ice with one claw and gestured with its wing to indicate the line would go across the pool. It pointed to Jazz, then pointed to Jazz’s current side of the line, and once again nudged the energon container toward him. Then it pointed to Jazz, and then to the other side of the line, and took the container away, hunching over it aggressively.

Not missing the implications or the threat, Jazz nodded. Ice capped over his nose as not all of the liquid could roll off before it froze. 

After that, the savage seemed… a little bit at a loss of what to do. It (he?) set the container aside and wandered around the cave, nosing aimlessly through rocks and crystals, and every once in awhile looking over at Jazz. 

Eventually, it sidled up to a deliberate-looking stack of rocks and started taking off its own armor. Unlike Jazz’s, which was primarily made up of the large breastplate that covered his vitals with a solid plate of metal, the savage’s was made up of smaller, fur-lined plates over its shoulders and arms, combined with a thick kilt, and… a mask. The dragon removed a mask, shedding the terrifying visage and much of the white fur around its face and torso. Beneath was, well, _more_ fur, in shades of black and white, and a red underbelly. His real face was wide and blunt with expressive optics and some still very impressive teeth. Two fan, or fin, shaped horns jutted out of his mane, gleaming bright red.

He (it?) arranged the armor carefully on the pile of rocks and came back to the pool, sliding into the silvery liquid with a purr Jazz felt vibrate through the fluid and against his scales. Great! Happy monster dragon was a good thing, right? But he was coming closer, and that was less of a good thing. 

_“Go away,”_ Jazz commed uselessly, trying to get out of his way. 

It was no use. There was no place to _go,_ except back out into the cold ice and chill vacuum. 

Fortunately, the dragon stopped. But he reached out with his now-exposed, furred face and sniffed at Jazz’s horns, the only part of him not submerged in the warm liquid.

He was warm. 

Every cable in Jazz’s frame tensed. His thoughts were already racing, running through the same questions over and over: are you going to eat me, please don’t eat me, how long before you eat me, please don’t eat me, why haven’t you already eaten me, please please please don’t eat me!

The dragon just sniffed curiously, then nuzzled Jazz’s snout and horn, like a creator quieting a fussy newbuild. 

Jazz swore he could feel the short in his processor as the action failed to compute.

The savage took advantage of Jazz’s stillness to come closer, draping one heavy, furred wing over top of him to trap him as he continued to nuzzle and poke at him curiously. Jazz felt teeth comb through his short, mane, and the furred dragon made an inquisitive croon that echoed through the metallic liquid. Jazz liked his mane, though right now it was soaked through with gallium and he couldn't see its proper light grey color. He didn’t know what was intriguing his… captor? rescuer? Jazz wasn’t sure… about the sodden, tangled strands. 

The creature found one of those tangles with his teeth, and Jazz braced for the brute to yank out a hunk of the plastic strands, but instead, he licked at it with what turned out to be a tongue covered in barbs. They combed through his mane, trying unsuccessfully to fluff it up in the molten gallium. He warbled softly, the sound carrying through the liquid. A question?

 _“What are you doing? I don’t know what you want!”_ It made Jazz feel the tiniest bit less helpless to talk to him, even if he was really only talking _at_ him. _“It’s not going to fluff, all it can do is soggy or frozen.”_

The other dragon made a soft sound, again not unlike one a creator would make to a distressed newbuild. He finished working out the tangle and moved down Jazz’s neck to finish… grooming? Was that what he was trying to do?… groom the rest of the thin, almost wispy strands as they floated. 

It actually felt kind of nice, which was good because Jazz couldn’t have stopped him if he’d wanted to. 

Feeding him and grooming him, though. Would a crazy savage dragon really do that with something it was going to eat? He’d have to be a really stupid crazy savage dragon for that, and Jazz was not getting the impression he was stupid.

Thick, warm fur slid along Jazz’s plating as the dragon finished up with his mane — still a useless, soggy mess, just one with fewer tangles in it — and repositioned, covering Jazz like a blanket. He sighed, then rested his head just below the surface of the liquid so that only his own optics and red horns broke the surface. Some of the fur ruff around his head also stood up out of the pool, but the metal didn’t cling to his fur the way it did to Jazz’s plating, rolling off and leaving him ice-free. 

Then… Nothing. Jazz didn’t see his optics switch off or anything, but he got the distinct impression the other dragon had gone into a rest cycle. 

Could he escape now?

Was there anywhere to escape to?

Gingerly, Jazz let himself relax into the other dragon’s fur. He was warmer than the liquid around them and obviously not going anywhere, so why not take advantage? It wasn’t like Jazz could stay tense indefinitely, especially now that the terror of waking up to being eaten by a monster was no longer flooding his lines. He had room in his processor now for other things, including the growing certainty that he wasn’t actually going to be eaten. He was just… stuck here, wherever here was.

Careful to neither lift his head from the warm pool nor disturb his rather insistent blanket too much, Jazz looked around the cave. The pool was irregularly shaped and at the exact center of a hemispherical cave. Ice made up the domed walls and ceiling, and it looked like Cybertron’s entire atmosphere solidified above this place, because the ground was metal and rock with only a thin sheen of snow at the edges of the cave, rather than just… more snow. Which told him why his radio wasn’t working: this cave was very deep. 

He spotted his armor at the edge of the cave, already collecting ice where it had fallen. Was the savage’s armor close enough to the pool to be getting heat from the rock? By comparison, it was clean and the gallium that had been frozen to it had dripped off into a puddle on the floor. 

Other than that, there wasn’t all that much to look at in the cave. The glowing rocks by which he was currently seeing were the most interesting thing, but he didn’t know how they were glowing. Some of the dragons back in Polyhex carved lamps out of sodium chloride rocks, to make a similar effect to these, but Jazz didn’t see any wires or lamp mounts where the electricity would be coming from. And you wouldn’t put salt lamps in a pool of gallium, just like you wouldn’t submerge _anything_ with unshielded wires in a conductive liquid. 

Maybe he’d be able to get a better look when the savage dragon messed with them again. The energon was over there, so he’d be going back to them eventually. He’d looked like he was trying to tell Jazz he’d bring him more fuel as long as he stayed on this side of the cave, but if he didn’t bring him anything he could try to get it himself.

Jazz’s snort caused the surface of the pool to bubble. Yeah, right. He could totally climb out without the metal freezing on him and leaving him a barely mobile target for the big dragon who was unfairly resistant to the cold.

This whole situation was unfair.

He didn’t understand. What had happened to him? What had that… that explosion been, and what did this dragon want from him? 

There was a rest cycle sneaking up on him too though. Jazz indulged in a single frustrated sigh and let his optics flicker off. He had so many questions, but there weren’t any answers to be had right now so he might as well sleep.

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Jazz woke with a flail when the other dragon hauled himself off of him and onto the edge of the pool. The dip in temperature from losing his wet blanket of fur was definitely noticeable and he started shivering. 

If the dragon saw, he didn’t show any sign. He shook metal from his fur, sending soon-to-be-ice-chunks everywhere, ridding himself of the drain on his heat. _He_ seemed perfectly comfortable in the frozen vacuum! 

_“You’re not fair, you know that?”_ Jazz righted himself and tucked his wings in close to his body in an attempt to retain some heat, even as he stretched his head out bit by bit for a better look at what the other dragon was doing. _“I’m just going to call you Unfairness.”_

Unfairness finished up grooming the last chunks of metal from his fur, then started poking around the glowing rocks again. Trying to figure out how the lamps worked, Jazz watched closer this time, but they just looked like rocks. Glowing rocks. Even when Unfairness picked them up, turning them around in his red claws, Jazz still couldn’t see any wires or switches or bulbs. 

He was frowning at the lights though, and Jazz couldn’t figure out why. Some of the further ones were dimmer (probably running out of battery?), but when Unfairness pushed them closer to the pool they slowly lit up again. For some reason that didn’t make the dragon happy though, and his frown deepened. 

Now that Jazz wasn’t overcome by the terror of imminent death… the savage did have a very expressive, almost gentle looking face. In fact, maybe it was the mounds and mounds of floof, but other than the red horns and claws, he looked very soft and rounded, almost more like a newbuild’s dragon plushy than a real dragon. No wonder he had that mask as part of his armor.

_“I wish you could talk.”_

But he couldn’t. He still didn’t even seem to hear the transmission. Whatever he was divining from the glowing rocks was making him more and more unhappy, but he was gentle when he reached in with his snout to carefully nudge four… mystery things under the surface of the opposite end of the pool. Jazz counted them as they moved, and the way the fluid shifted suggested they were fairly large. 

Curiosity had Jazz creeping closer to the line down the center of the cave. 

Unfairness lifted his head from the liquid, shook the silvery metal off of himself, bristled his fur, and bared his teeth in threat at Jazz. _Those_ were _not_ soft and plushy-like at all! _Stay over there._

Jazz stopped where he was. _“I’m still on my side, see?”_ He made a point of looking over at the line carved into the ground, proving that he knew where it was. _“I just want to know what you’re doing.”_

Unfairness growled silently a moment longer, just to get his point across.

Then he relaxed and checked on the lights again. Jazz couldn’t tell if any had dimmed again (he didn’t think so) but the other dragon was clearly displeased with them anyway. Once finished, he went and put on his armor, donning all the extra white fur and cloth and extra bits of plating and the scary mask. 

Vicious snarl now firmly affixed in place, he came back to the pool to loom over Jazz.

 _“I’m going, I’m going! See?”_ Jazz backed away, both from him and from whatever was over there in the Forbidden Zone. 

Satisfied, Unfairness turned and stalked away, somehow disappearing into the rocks and ice at the edge of the cave. An entrance? There had to be one. The wild dragon had carried Jazz in here _somehow._ It was definitely a fitting name for him; everything Unfairness did inspired more questions, and Jazz couldn’t ask him any of them!

He waited for the furry dragon to come back. He waited for several breems! But… he didn't. Unfairness had really left?

Time to go see what was in the Forbidden Zone!

Moving quickly to minimize his chances of getting caught, Jazz darted across the pool and felt around with his feet for the… things he knew were there. He found four round lumps nestled into a patch of sand or gravel (the rest of the pool’s floor was made of sharp rock or stone). He was careful, aware that if Unfairness suspected he’d been over here and tampered with whatever these were, he’d be mad and definitely stop feeding him and maybe kill him too. So, at first, he tried to assuage his curiosity just by touch and feel. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t much information to be had that way. They were the same temperature as the pool itself and kind of oval-shaped. Textured, a little, but not in a way that made sense to Jazz. That was it.

He reeeeeeally wanted a look at them!

Jazz peeked over at the entrance again, weighing the risks.

Just a peek… He carefully pushed the gravel away from one of them so that he could re-bury it right where it belonged and then lifted it up to the surface. He didn’t want to take it _out_ of the pool, but… there. Just a small part of the thing’s surface became visible. The molten gallium rolled off of it revealing… a colored, repeating pattern that Jazz didn’t understand. 

It was obviously dragonmade, something some dragon had worked hard on decorating but… it didn’t make sense. What was it? And why did Unfairness have it buried in the sand at the bottom of a pool of low melting point metal?

As carefully as he could, Jazz put the thing back in its spot and pushed the gravel back into place so he could slip back to His Side to puzzle over the mystery where Unfairness wouldn’t be mad at him.

He sank back into the pool up to his optics to warm back up. He wished it was warmer, like when he’d been cuddled up to the other dragon, but at the same time… it was a good thing Unfairness wasn’t here. He knew it probably wasn’t true, that the dragon just couldn’t hear his transmissions, but he didn’t like being ignored and threatened. And seriously, what was there to threaten him over? A bunch of ornamental lob balls? He’d assumed Unfairness didn’t want him getting into his energon stores, but those things weren’t fuel containers, they were… Jazz had no idea what they were, besides weird.

Unfairness was weird.

He was probably weird and crazy even for a savage dragon. Savage dragons were… 

Well, other than mean, vicious, cannibals, “active in the winter” and “planning an attack on the Wall”, Jazz wasn’t sure what a savage dragon really was. He’d always kind of imagined either a misshapen monster that wasn’t actually a dragon at all, or a super mean version of, well, _normal_ dragons with longer teeth. Unfairness wasn’t a misshapen monster _or_ a normal dragon. He was a bossy pile of fur with teeth.

Admittedly, it was the “with teeth” part that Jazz was worried about the most. That and the “was he ever coming back” part. He’d been gone a while. The not knowing was awful, even if it was far too soon to start really panicking over it. Sure, having him back meant having the teeth back, but it also meant having the warm back. Jazz was really missing all that ridiculous fur by now — the pool was not warm enough by itself, not now that he’d pretty much burned through the energon Unfairness had given him.

Jazz lifted his head from the metal again, shaking away the solid chunks of gallium that were forming on the surface. Maybe he could find other canisters of energon and sneak some? He hadn’t been told _not_ to. He’d just been told to stay on this side of the cave, away from the decorative lob balls. And without Unfairness here to pounce on him for it, maybe he’d risk crawling out into the freezing cold to snatch one. 

The lights at the far edges of the cave had dimmed again, which didn’t help, but he didn’t see anything that could be an energon canister, either the cubes his own people used or the lidded bowl-like thing Unfairness had given him earlier. 

Greeeeeat. They were under the rocks, weren’t they? If there were any at all. Jazz didn’t want to climb out and freeze himself for nothing, but if he didn’t at least try soon he’d still freeze, just where he was. Slowly.

Yup. He was going to do it.

That resolve almost didn’t survive him raising his front feet up to grab the edge of the pool. His claws, dripping with gallium, froze to the ground and stuck, and the solid metal pulled the heat out of him so quickly it actually felt like bleeding.

The gallium in his mane solidified slightly slower, but some of it still _stuck._ Jazz shook his head to fling as much of it off as possible, but already the sodden strands felt heavy and stiff. Elsewhere, where the vacuum insulated it against his plating, it dripped off sluggishly, kept semi-liquid by his own heat. 

Gallium was soft, so at least he could pull his forefeet up, even as they froze to the ground. Primus. How the frag did Unfairness do this and make it look easy? It was _cold!_

It was counterintuitive, but Jazz forced himself to move slowly. He wanted to rush, to get out and back in as fast as possible, but the cold was worse the more metal he had on him, and that meant it was better to crawl out slowly and try to get it all to drip off. Which was _awful._

It felt like it took joors, and he was shivering by the time he managed to get out and was finally free to move around. He still had frozen metal between his toes and fingers, and stuck in his mane and the tufts of fur on his elbows, ankles, and tail, clinging to his joints, and leeching heat from his wings. He tried licking some of it off, and it melted a bit, but he’d freeze into stasis if he just stood there to groom himself clean. Ugh. It was cold and getting colder and also stiff and _sticky._

So where was the energon?

Stumbling on feet he could barely feel, Jazz skirted the edge of the pool and walked up to the dimly glowing rocks Unfairness had been so unhappy with. Jazz didn’t see anything wrong with them, apart from not being edible and still having no discernable mechanism for the glow. And also being cold, of course. He moved them as little as possible in his efforts to see under them, not because he was trying to disguise messing with them but because it hurt his fingers to touch them. 

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing… No energon here. Jazz poked through the other rocks, the non-glowing ones, and there was still no energon at all. The only things Unfairness had left behind were the decorative lob balls, the glowing rocks, and the stack he’d left his armor on. Oh, and Jazz’s armor, which was now iced over completely at the edge of the cave. He thought about going over to get it for less than a nanoklik; it was too far away and the ground was too cold. 

He _did_ find the door though! It didn’t look super different from the airlock doors built into the Wall, though Jazz couldn’t figure out why Unfairness would bother with an airlock when there was no atmosphere to be kept in. At least he knew how to get out of the cave now. Huzzah! Unfortunately, it was also too far away for Jazz to get to without freezing right to the ice-covered rock, and starting to ice over as well. _Not_ huzzah! How did Unfairness expect Jazz to survive without energon? How did _Unfairness_ survive without energon stores in his cave?

Praying that was why he’d left and that he’d be back with something soon, Jazz struggled back to the pool and stepped/slipped/fell back in. His whole frame _shook_ from the temperature shock. If there’d been enough atmosphere to carry it, he was sure he’d have heard himself cry out. The gallium at the surface might have still been cooling into chunks, but after his sojourn around the cave, even that low temperature felt like it was burning him. 

He was going to die like this, shaking and sobbing and burning-freezing in an ice cave all alone far away from home. No one would even know what had happened to him. Not even Ricochet. Jazz really, _really,_ hoped that his twin wasn’t flying out, away from the Wall, searching for him, because there was obviously no point. Even if he knew where to look, he’d never find this cave. 

Death sure was taking its time though. After what felt like an interminable amount of time the twitching and shaking stopped and Jazz was able to curl up in a loose ball and… wait. He could just see the glowing rocks over the edge of the pool from where he’d floated to a stop and he stared at them, their light wavering as he lost focus.

.

.

.

tbc


	2. Chapter 2

He wasn’t sure how long he had stayed like that, watching the light dim and becoming increasingly certain he was going to die when Unfairness thundered (not literally, because vacuum) back into the cave, shaking icicles off his (his armor’s?) fur. Jazz blinked, about seventy percent certain he was hallucinating as the other dragon bristled and visibly growled at the dim light. Then the dragon hit one of the rocks, sending it skittering into the Ice Zone where it finally died and making Jazz jerk in surprise. Had he—?

The question had barely formed in Jazz’s mind when the dragon came over to the pool to loom over him, opened a new bowl of energon, and set it down in front of Jazz. He stalked around the pool to check on the decorative lob balls. He growled, the sound echoing through the molten metal, and snapped at Jazz’s tail, which he belatedly realized was over in the Forbidden Zone. 

_ Sorry, _ Jazz wanted to say, but he was too tired for useless comms. Sluggishly he curled his tail around, tucking it up against his frame where Unfairness (hopefully) wouldn’t object to it. 

He didn’t, but he didn’t seem happy as he checked on the lob balls either. He flicked chunks of congealed gallium away with his claws and Jazz could feel his continued growling. 

He shook the silvery liquid off of his mane and armor and glared right at Jazz.

Jazz thought he might have noticed that one of the balls had been moved while he was gone, and shrank back as Unfairness returned, but all he did was push the bowl closer to Jazz again with a visibly impatient huff.  _ Drink that. _

He didn’t have to not-say that twice.

Close as it was, reaching for the bowl was an effort. Jazz had to really concentrate to avoid accidentally knocking it over, but in the end, he managed. The fuel helped immediately, his grip becoming more sure and his movements less jerky with each gulp. 

When he looked up again, he saw that Unfairness had shed his armor again and it was waiting on the pile of rocks… except for the hind-leg drape, which he had unwound and unpleated into an absurdly long length of fur-lined cloth, now laid out on the ground close to the edge of the pool. 

Once he had it however it was he wanted it, Unfairness stopped fussing with the fabric and came stalking over to Jazz again. Afraid he was going to take the bowl away, Jazz clung to it and drank as fast as he could. The fur around his face ruffled as the dragon let out another impatient huff and he stopped, creepily watching Jazz and waiting for him to finish. 

Jazz held the empty bowl out when he finished, trying to figure out what Unfairness wanted  _ now. _

The dragon just took the bowl and tossed it aside, uncaring about it. He reached into the pool and hauled Jazz’s head out of the gallium — ack! — then started licking it clean. Instinctively Jazz tried to escape, then stilled when the licking didn’t escalate to include teeth. Not much teeth anyway. Every time the part of Jazz he was working on was clean enough, Unfairness would use a gentle bite to haul the next part up to work on and keep him from retreating back into the (relatively) warm pool.

Jazz only realized that Unfairness was trying to get him  _ all the way out of the pool _ when he cleaned off the first of Jazz’s forefeet and instead of just letting it go, firmly put it down on the rock before working on the other.

_ “No! I already almost died once today, I don’t want to die again!”  _ Jazz jerked his foot back up away from the freezing floor.

Unfairness bristled and bared his teeth, again gently and firmly placing Jazz’s hand on the floor.

Jazz whined and wiggled in Unfairness’ completely unfair grip, wanting to pull away from the floor again and afraid of the consequences.  _ Cold-teeth-cold-teeth-cold  _ chased each other around his head in circles going nowhere, though the lack of metal ice on his plating did make a noticeable difference to just how cold that cold actually felt.

Unfairness let his hand go when he didn’t try to lift it again, only to pick up his other forelimb. This time he did it more forcefully, and Jazz had to shift weight forward, preventing him from easily retreating back into the pool. Then he started cleaning it of molten, quickly congealing metal. 

Jazz stopped fighting; he knew he’d lost. He was not, however, done complaining about it.  _ “I hate you, you’re mean and scary and you don’t explain anything and you’re way too fuzzy!” _

_ Exasperation _ flickered through the dragon’s rather minimal EM field. 

_ “You’re stupid too if you’re going to drag me out of the pool so I can freeze to death after you went to all the trouble of saving my life.”  _ Except he wasn’t actually stupid. Jazz hoped that meant there was a good reason for this. 

The exasperation spiked at Jazz’s continued hesitation, flaring into actual anger a couple of times when he balked at coming farther out of the relatively warm pool, but Unfairness didn’t claw or bite him at any point in the process. He stayed gentle and firm, only occasionally growling. Jazz’s whining slowly tapered off, and he even went ahead and took a voluntary step away from the pool rather than jumping back in when all four feet were finally on the ground.

He knew from experience that jumping back into the pool wasn’t anywhere near as pleasant in practice as it was in theory.

Finished with the poof of fuzz at the end of Jazz’s tail, Unfairness circled him and pressed his chin to the side of Jazz’s neck so Jazz could feel him  _ purrl  _ in approval. With a jolt, Jazz realized that the other dragon was actually  _ smaller _ than he was, with his optics only coming up to Jazz’s chin. Wow. The floof (and the teeth and the fear) had made him look  _ much _ bigger!

Unfairness didn’t give him a lot of time to absorb that revelation, grabbing a hunk of Jazz’s mane and tugging him over to the pile of rocks with the armor on it. He backed up to look at Jazz expectantly. 

_ “You want help putting it on?”  _ Jazz looked at the armor, trying to find which piece needed to go on first. He was no kobold, but he’d do his best… Picking up the first (fuzzy!) shoulder plate, he stepped forward to put it on the other dragon. Unfairness's fuzzy paw stopped him, preventing the round plate of metal from moving further. Then he pushed it toward Jazz. 

Wait. He wanted  _ him  _ to wear it?  _ “But I’ve got my own…”  _ Jazz looked over at the scraps that were what was left of his armor. The straps were all chewed to bits, for  _ some  _ reason. They had also been thrown over into the Creeping Ice zone by the wall, and since he didn’t have any furry insulation on his armor, he’d probably freeze instantly if he tried putting it on. 

Putting on Unfairness’ relatively warm, fur-lined armor made a lot more sense. 

Still, Jazz hesitated.  _ “Are you sure? What about you?”  _ He tried to put his concern in his face, hoping for some kind of confirmation.

Unfairness just blinked and pushed the armor at Jazz again, then abandoned him to go over to where he had laid the fur-lined hind leg wrap out to its full, absurd length. He licked it, warming it, then fished out one of the decorative lob balls to cradle carefully in the cloth. 

That was not the one Jazz had pulled up before — it had different patterns and colors on it.  _ “What is it?”  _ Jazz craned his neck for a better look as he worked the first shoulder plate into place. Unfairness ignored him in favor of pulling up a second ovoid. As the gallium dripped away, he could see that it was equally intricate and ornate.  _ “Come ooooon, what are they?” _ Still no answer. The dragon just cleaned it up and nestled it in next to its peer. 

Jazz gave up and turned his focus back to the armor. It wasn’t easy to fasten himself without an extra set of hands! Why did savage dragons have to  _ eat _ kobolds? If they didn’t then maybe there’d be a cohort of them here to help! 

He finished with the first shoulder piece and tugged on the second, gripping the fur with his teeth so he could fish for the straps with his free hand. He tried to work fast; he wanted to go see what Unfairness was doing up close! Unfortunately, the rest of Unfairness’s armor turned out to be trickier than the pauldrons. The spats were bizarrely shaped, with the ankle in entirely the wrong spot. The gauntlets were too loose. The helmet was  _ both, _ built for a shorter face and neck, but a much larger mane of fur. Jazz couldn’t get it to sit right over the horns on his face and had to rest the mask on the top of his head, where it squished his ears against his skull. At least that meant he didn’t have to deal with the suuuper weird eyehole placement. 

Once he had everything on, though, he did start to feel warmer… a little. The spats and gauntlets kept his feet from touching the ground, and the pauldrons and mask both reduced how much heat he radiated into the vacuum. 

Unfairness had stayed busy while Jazz struggled into the armor. When Jazz was finally able to look over at him again, he had all four of the things wrapped up in the cloth and was securing the… impromptu sling around his body with a complicated looking knot, snugging the lob balls securely into the thick fur of his chest.

Ohhh.  _ “Are we going somewhere?”  _ Jazz shuffled toward him, moving awkwardly in the misfitting armor.

The dragon didn’t answer. He finished up, reared and flapped his wings a few times to test that the secured ovoids wouldn’t shift, then let himself fall back to all fours. Then he looked Jazz over and even test-tugged a few pieces of the armor as though checking that they were on as best they could be. None of them came off, but Jazz didn’t appreciate him messing up the delicate helm situation and he tried to shuffle away.

Unfairness let him… sort of. He caught a lock of the mask’s fur and tugged Jazz, then turned and loped toward where Jazz knew the airlock-door was. 

Definitely going somewhere then.

Jazz perked up. Maybe he’d be able to figure out where he was!

When they got to the airlock, Jazz saw that Unfairness had left it open when he’d come in. No air meant he hadn’t been letting the cold weather in or out, but still… no one left an airlock open in Polyhex, for any reason. Not even if it was obviously icing up like this one. So it was probably a good thing this one was still open because Jazz didn’t like the idea of being trapped, but still…  _ no one _ left an airlock open!

Heedless of Jazz’s confusion, Unfairness crawled through, arching his back to keep the sling from brushing the bottom of the ice tunnel on the other side. 

The tunnel wasn’t wide enough for them to fit side by side, so Jazz followed close on his heels. He couldn’t actually see him very well, if at all, once they left the dimly glowing rocks behind, but it was easy to tell where he was by the vibrations of his footsteps… 

After a short walk, they emerged from the burrow into the night. Immediately, Unfairness launched himself on antigravs and microthrusters, away from the snow and into a veritable sea of stars.

Jazz didn’t waste any time jumping into the air to get his feet off the ground and his wings in the sky either. The armor made his ascent a bit clunky (and flying in a vacuum was already a bit clunky all on its own) but there was instant relief from the cold as he lost contact with the ice. 

Up and up and up, he kept going until the tundra sprawled out below unobstructed. Aside from the spot of thermal color in the sky nearby that was Unfairness, all he could see was the frozen winter wasteland. He paused, hovering in place. The starlit snow was still beautiful, but it looked different now; less like a blanket and more like a shroud.

Unfairness circled back and buzzed Jazz to nip at his tail impatiently.

_ “Hey!”  _ Jazz swatted at him, missing completely. He still needed to figure out where the Wall was! He switched frequencies on his comsuite and sent out a ping.  _ “Hello?” _

The only response was the hiss of static. 

He tried several more times, but he didn’t even get the soft feedback of the signal breaking down. Was he…?

Jazz craned his neck to look up again. No atmosphere. Which meant his signals weren’t bouncing back down to the ground, and instead were traveling in straight lines out into space. If he’d been within flying distance of the Wall, that wouldn’t have mattered.  _ Absolutely no _ response meant… he was very far away from home. 

Too far away from home to  _ get  _ home, even if he’d known which direction to fly. South, presumably, but there was a lot of south to die in if he was off by even a little bit, and the only thing he knew about winter navigation was how to stay on his patrol route. 

The next time Unfairness buzzed him, Jazz didn’t try to hit him. He just turned and followed, trying not to let the weight in his spark drag him back down to the ground.

There was no time while flying through Cybertron’s eternal night. Just the slow radiation of heat away from his frame, the tick-down of fuel from constantly firing his microthrusters. He was cold. He knew the sky wasn’t as cold as the icy surface, and he much preferred to stay flying to landing to rest but… he was cold and he was tired and he wanted to go  _ home. _

After what seemed like forever, Unfairness angled his flight back down, diving toward the base of a ridge. Jazz shuddered, equally looking forward to their destination (and hopefully someplace a little warm and maybe some fuel?) and dreading landing on Cybertron’s surface again. 

At first, he didn’t see anywhere to land. Unfairness was skimming along just above the ground with obvious purpose, but all Jazz could make out was ice and snow and more ice and snow, with the occasional bare peek of the ridge now towering over them. Then, all of a sudden, a crack opened up in that ridge, like the entrance to a tunnel. Jazz would have missed it completely if Unfairness hadn’t flown straight to it.

It was a  _ tight _ squeeze. Ahead of him, Unfairness navigated the crags and pillars and squeezes with practiced ease, but Jazz kept having to tuck his wings in close to his body to eel through gaps on his antigravs like an awkward space worm… and even then, he occasionally bumped up against the walls. 

Unlike the ice tunnel, this place was an absolute maze. Jazz didn’t think he’d be able to navigate back out on his own.

Unfairness finally landed, carefully setting down his hind legs and using his wings to guide the rest of him down so that the sling and its contents didn’t touch the frozen ground. Jazz wondered what was so special about this crevasse… until he spotted another airlock door, this one inset securely into the rock. 

_ “Please tell me there’s a cave in there.”  _ A nice, warm cave with a big pile of cushions in front of a gloriously glowing heater and enough energon to curl up with and wait out the winter.

Unfairness held out his wing so Jazz couldn’t see how he keyed the airlock open, but he didn’t have to nip more than once to get Jazz scrambling in. The door closed behind them, locking with a  _ thunk _ and then cycling in an actual  _ atmosphere. _

A  _ warm _ atmosphere!

Jazz’s happy chirp echoed around the cave, bouncing off the uneven walls in what could hardly be called a musical fashion but it was  _ sound  _ and it was beautiful! He did it again, just to hear something after so much silence. Unfairness looked blankly at him —  _ Primus, you’re weird _ — before leading the way deeper inside. 

This cave had a… an ecosystem of crystals and critters all clustered around another pool of molten gallium. Things flitted through the liquid, disturbing the surface. Smoky quartz grew around the edges covered in silvery crystal… things. There were more glowing rocks like those in the other cave too, but they weren’t bright enough to drown out the millions of blue dots nestled on the ceiling above a network of clear, crystal-like droplets. Jazz had never seen anything like it

Unfairness ignored it all in favor of quickly loosening the sling so he could remove the decorative lob balls. He checked each one over carefully, turning and nuzzling it, before placing it gingerly into the silvery liquid. His behavior confused Jazz more than ever. He was treating the things like they were precious, but they weren’t made out of anything delicate or valuable… unless Jazz had missed something when he’d snuck his look earlier. Since he wasn’t busy arguing with armor this time, he crept closer for a better look at the three ovoids still resting on the blanket.

Unfairness saw him, hunched over them protectively, and bared his teeth. This time his growl echoed audibly through the chamber’s atmosphere.

“I’m not going to touch them!”

“Ye better nae,” the dragon growled back, showing his teeth. “Dinnae even—”

“Oh! You do talk!” Jazz hadn’t been expecting a response; not a verbal one, anyway. Did he— no, still no response to a generalized ping. But he could  _ talk! _ Cowering back in the face of those teeth, Jazz babbled, “I promise, I won’t hurt them, I just want to know what they are!”

Unfairness growled a nanoklik longer, then sniffed. He returned to his task of carefully nestling the ovoids into the pool. “Yer what? Two vorns? Old enough tae have seen at least one ensparking. Were ye chasing copter-flies when the chasers returned with the sparks?”

“I’ve seen plenty of ensparkings!” Helped with them, even. Assuming a chaser was the same thing as a seeker, “I  _ am  _ a chaser.”

The other dragon snorted in disbelief and nuzzled at the… more than four things in the liquid. 

“Come on, what do those have to do with ensparking?” 

“How the  _ frag _ have ye not seen an egg before?” Unfairness lifted his head out of the liquid to glare at him. “Nevermind. It dinnae matter. Just stay  _ away _ from them!”

“Okay! This is me, staying away from them!” Jazz scooted back a couple of steps, keeping himself close to the ground without pressing himself to it. There was armor between it and his feet, but his chest was bare and while the air was reasonably warm, the floor still wasn’t. “But, um. I haven’t even heard of an ‘egg’ before. What are they for?”

Unfairness just gave him an incredulous look, then turned away, checking on the glowing rock lights. “Carson a choimheadas tu às deidh pàisde? Nach eil gu leòr agam ri dhèanamh an-dràsta?” 

Jazz blinked and played that back in his head. It didn’t make any more sense the second time around than it had the first, though it did explain the odd accent Unfairness had when he wasn’t speaking whatever language that was. Savage dragon language. “I’m guessing they’re important, right?”

“Catching a spark dinnae do ye any good unless ye have something to enspark,” Unfairness didn’t even look at him, still occupied with the glowy rocks. “Ye ever gonna take that armor off or are ye just gonna clunk around in it fer the rest of winter?” 

For a moment Jazz seriously considered that. The armor was awkward and clunky, but it was also warm. Also not his, and its owner had basically just told him to take it off. Jazz began working at the straps. So the eggs were for holding sparks somehow? Ensparking, as Jazz knew it, involved placing newly-caught sparks directly into newly-built frames. Why put it in an egg first? 

Maybe it made the sparks easier to carry?

“Ye can put it over on that pile of rocks,” Unfairness said, pointing to… a pile of rocks. One stacked almost identically to the pile he’d kept his armor on in the other cave. Odd. 

“So,” Jazz began stacking the armor the way he remembered Unfairness doing it, “what are you doing with the eggs? Why do they need the gallium?”

The unfairly floofy dragon scoffed. “Amadan… I’m protecting them.” He checked over the lights, picking each one up and turning it over before setting it back down. 

Again with the rocks. Jazz finished with the armor and walked over to sniff at them.

“Carson a tharraing mi a-mach às an t-sneachda thu?… Get in the pool before ye freeze,” Unfairness barked. “Yer sense o’ the cold’s dulled by yer time in it. It’s nae  _ that _ warm in here.”

Jazz snorted. It was practically a sauna compared to the last cave, but “comparison” was the keyword there. He would have liked to explore a bit more first, but Unfairness looked like he was about ready to swat him into the pool if he didn’t crawl in on his own and those teeth and claws weren’t any less intimidating now that their owner was talking. 

He made sure he went to the side farthest away from the eggs first, then carefully lowered himself in with a happy chirr at the temperature. Jazz wasn’t sure if this pool really  _ was _ warmer, or if (as Unfairness had implied) his flight through the freezing temperatures outside had skewed his perception. Either way, though, it was lovely. 

He found a perfectly dragon-sized depression in the rocks and snugged into it comfortably, and it wasn’t until he’d instinctively curled up  _ just so _ that he realized this was also a deliberate formation made for convenience, like the pile of rocks for Unfairness’ armor. 

“Hey — did you  _ make  _ this place?”

“Of course nae.” Unfairness finished up with the last rock, putting it carefully in its place. He draped the cloth over the armor rock, then came over to the pool. He didn’t get right in though; instead, he nosed his way through the crystals growing on the edge until—

SNAP!

He whipped his head up with a crystalline… thing caught in his jaws, crunching through the crustation’s armor and eating it. 

“Eep!” Jazz jerked back with a small splash. “What was that?!”

“Gealach… Moonbeam? Moonbeam crayfish.”

“But you  _ ate  _ it!” Bugs crawling around was totally normal, but they weren’t food! Well, maybe for kobolds, sometimes, but not for dragons! Ew!

“I am nae hunting again until I’ve rested from the flight.” The dragon sat down and used his hind leg to scratch through his mane. “And it’s too soon to pull from the cache.”

Right. Hunting. Savage dragons ate whatever they could catch and kill during the winter. Jazz shuddered. Better the bugs than him, but still. Yuck!

…He wasn’t going to have to eat them too, was he? Unfairness had refined energon stashed somewhere, but if he was being careful about how much he took from it then it probably wasn’t a very big cache. 

Unfairness polished off his kill, leaving no part of the bug-thing uneaten, and nosed through the crystals again, crunching smaller things that he didn’t pull up where Jazz could see. Jazz half watched, half stared at the surface of the pool, trying not to worry about how much fuel there might be, especially with two dragons drawing on it instead of one, compared to how much winter was left.

When he finished, Unfairness slipped into the pool and cuddled up to Jazz. “At least yer good fer one thing…” he muttered, draping his wing over Jazz’s body and resting his head in his short mane. 

“You make a better blanket than me,” Jazz pointed out, snuggling right back. Unfairness was fuzzy and warm and all he had for company and comfort, which wasn’t saying much. He gulped back a whine. He really missed Ricochet.

“I dinnae even know why ye’d build a dragon without fur,” Unfairness grumbled. 

“Because it’d be too warm. Which sounds absolutely ridiculous right about now,” Jazz admitted, “but it would be if I was home.”

Unfairness just snorted. 

“I’d ask why you  _ do  _ have all that fur, but,” he’d already figured it out. The other dragon needed all that fur so he didn’t freeze living on the surface and hunting in the snow.

“What the frag were ye doing out in the winter anyway?” the dragon growled softly. “Shouldn’t ye be hibernating with the rest o’ yer creche?”

“Hibernating?” 

Unfairness scoffed.  _ “Sleeping. _ What yer  _ supposed _ tae do when it’s cold enough tae freeze oxygen outside.”

“I sleep!” Winter naps were great! Especially after a patrol, which Jazz suddenly wasn’t sure he should be bringing up. Yes, it was why he’d been outside, but Unfairness was resting his head on his  _ neck. _ Jazz didn’t want him taking offense at what he’d been patrolling  _ for. _ “We can’t stay inside all winter though. If we didn’t fly at all for the whole winter we’d go crazy.”

“That’s why ye  _ hibernate _ instead of just recharge.” 

“How’s that different?”

Unfairness made an exasperated grumbling sound. “Ye shut down somewhere safe. Stasis.” 

“Stasis?” That wasn’t sleeping, that was for healing from serious injuries. “I don’t need to be in— actually I’m probably lucky I don’t need to be in stasis, that explosion could have done a lot more damage than it did.”

_ “Should _ be hibernating!” 

“Who’d do my job then?”

“Someone with  _ fur.” _

Jazz extricated his head from all of Unfairness’ fur to look him in the optics. “I’ve never seen anyone with fur like yours. No one has this much fur.”

Unfairness fluffed up his fur proudly. “I had extra fur installed.” 

Oh. Not all savage dragons were this fuzzy then? Still fuzzier than anyone Jazz knew if Unfairness thought his perfectly normal amount of fur was so lacking though. Jazz burrowed back into the floof. “It’s cozy.”

Something in the dragon’s EM field softened. “Ye should rest too.”

Jazz didn’t feel all that tired, but Unfairness was probably right. It hadn’t been as long as a full patrol, but they had just flown a good distance. Naps after flying were good.

It wasn’t like there was anything else to do.

Unfairness gently pushed Jazz’s head down onto a formation of rock perfectly positioned to cradle his head and keep just his optics above the melted gallium. Then he laid his own head next to/on top of Jazz’s and  _ purrled _ soothingly. It felt nice, vibrating gently through his frame, and Jazz shut his optics and listened to it until he fell asleep.

He dreamed he was curled up with his twin, toasty and cozy when his and Ricochet's cohort of kobolds came to wake them with breakfast and a nice warm rubdown… Instead what he got was rudely pushed over with a splash when Unfairness hauled himself unceremoniously from the pool, effortlessly shaking off the molten gallium and floofing out his fur. 

“What’s going on?” Jazz shook his head too, dislodging more sleep than gallium. “You going out again?”

“I have a  _ job _ tae do, crecheling.” Unfairness groomed the last of the metal from his feet and his tail, then paced around the cave to check on the lights. None of them had dimmed this time, and the dragon seemed satisfied with that as he checked the “eggs” directly. Also satisfied with that, he started putting on his armor. 

“I’m not a crecheling,” Jazz pouted, which only made him sound like one. He flicked the surface of the pool, annoyed. “I thought your job was protecting those things.”

“It is. And if ye dinnae stay  _ away _ from them while I’m gone…” 

“I won’t touch them!” 

The dragon’s fur smoothed out and he pulled on the mask and its additional layer of fur. “I have tae visit two more sites and check on them, and it’ll take longer than my previous hunting trip.”

Longer? He’d been gone forever last time! Jazz had been running on fumes. “What about fuel?”

“I’ll bring back some o’ that too,” Unfairness said with an air of resignation.

“Sorry…” He couldn’t help it though! All the flying and especially staying warm in all the cold was fuel intensive.

Unfairness sighed and made a comforting-a-newbuild sound. “This is a better cave for ye,” he assured. “Just… try and sleep?” He didn’t sound too sure about that suggestion. “Or see if ye can catch something.” 

“And stay away from the eggs,” Jazz tacked on helpfully.

“Right.” Unfairness  _ purrled _ one time, which was not as comforting when he was wearing the scary mask, then turned toward the airlock.

Struck by a sudden nervousness, Jazz called after him, “You are coming back though? Promise?”

The dragon looked back at him and resettled his wings. “Promise.” 

“Okay.” Jazz really did need him to come back. “Watch out for the ground exploding.”

Unfairness just blinked and turned away again. This time, in a cave with air in it, Jazz heard the unseen airlock open, then close, then start to cycle. 

Then Unfairness was gone, and Jazz was on his own. 

.

.

.

tbc


	3. Chapter 3

On his own again with nothing to do, Jazz blew bored bubbles in the surface of the gallium pool. At least this cave had…  _ slightly _ more in it to look at than just the Forbidden Zone with the “eggs” in it. There were… critters. And crystals. And… not a whole lot else, really.

He was tempted to go over and take another look at the eggs, to get a  _ better _ look now that he knew Unfairness would be gone for a while. Some of the designs he’d glimpsed were, well,  _ pretty. _ Savage dragons weren’t supposed to make pretty things! Then again, they  _ weren’t supposed _ to have airlocks and armor either. And Unfairness didn’t seem fuel-mad, which was the only thing wild dragons  _ were supposed _ to be!

What did Unfairness do all winter? He had a “job” and had to go out to hunt, but that couldn’t be everything, right? Winter was a very long season. Why hadn’t he added anything to do for fun to this cave? Someone had modified the pool to be more comfortable to curl up in, they could have put in a chessboard or something!

Left with few choices, Jazz crept over to the Forbidden Zone. He’d said he wouldn’t touch the eggs, but touching was… like moving them and stuff, right? And  _ that _ had been before he knew how boring being stuck in here would be! He could… brush them with his tail tuft to count them? He knew there were more than just the four they’d brought over from the other cave. 

Sure enough, trailing his tail over the spot Unfairness had put them revealed a total count of eight. Four and four; why hadn’t Unfairness just put them all in here in the first place? This cave might be boring, but the other one had been miserable. 

Were there more eggs hidden out there in other caves? That would explain the other dragon leaving these behind to do his “job” when he should be protecting them, but really, it would be a lot easier to look after them all in one place! 

But… What if this cave turned miserable? Jazz didn’t think it would — he  _ hoped _ it wouldn’t! — but… other than the lack of air, had that other one been so bad at the beginning of winter? If this cave stopped making heat or whatever, could Unfairness move all eight eggs now that they were in the same place? Probably not by himself, and apparently there weren’t any other savage dragons around to help because they were “hibernating”. 

Should’ve just left the things with them.

Jazz brushed the eggs again, confirming they were all roughly the same size. They wouldn’t be all that difficult to walk off with if it wasn’t a frozen deathscape outside. Using that environmental hazard as a way to keep them from being stolen was smart, though it begged the question, what from?  _ He  _ certainly wasn’t going to steal them.

Bored, and still trying to resist picking the eggs up now that he’d promised not to touch them instead of having been silently threatened into submission, Jazz turned back to the dragon-shaped depression at the edge of the pool. Unfairness had said to sleep if he could… But Jazz didn’t want to sleep! 

He was still dithering when, as his tail drifted near the eggs,  _ something _ chomped on it!

“Hey!” Jazz whipped his tail up out of the liquid metal to get away from the whatever-it-was, but it had a firm hold and he wound up inadvertently bringing the bitey thing up to the surface as well. “That hurts, let go!”

It didn’t let go. At first, Jazz couldn’t get a good look at it, but when he swished his tail, trying to shake it off, the gallium flew away and he saw a… fish… thing… that looked like it was made of magma latched onto his tail. 

“Ow!”

_ WHACK! _

He slammed the thing down on the ground outside the pool, hoping to stun it into releasing him. When it did, Jazz saw a mouth full of rows and rows of sharp, serrated teeth. It flopped against the rock, undulating almost randomly, unable to move effectively on land. 

“What the heck are you?” Jazz crawled up after it, shaking as much gallium off as he could as it went unpleasantly cold against his plating. Bonus though: it didn’t instantly freeze solid. 

He batted the magma-fish thing across the floor so it wouldn’t flop back into the pool before pinning its tail and examining it. On a more thorough inspection, Jazz revised his initial impression. It looked like it was made from silvery rock. What he’d thought was glowing magma was actually some sort of internal light shining through gaps along the seams in its rock-like plating… He’d never seen anything like it. In shape, it was long and streamlined, with triangle-shaped fins along its back and sides. And the teeth! It looked swift and vicious and dangerous… but not big enough to attack a dragon.

“You,” he informed the creature as it wriggled helplessly under his claws, “are a dumb fish.”

Unless… it had attacked his tail when it was right next to the eggs. Had it been going after them!?!

Dumb and dead it was!

Threat swiftly dispatched, Jazz left the carcass with the intent of climbing back in the pool. The crystals along the bank distracted him before he got there. There was more than one kind, all growing together haphazardly like a garden someone had let go to seed. Unfairness, or someone, had made sand beds for the eggs and comfy depressions to lay in… why not tend the garden too? And why grow just plain, smoky quartz and living gallium crystals and all of these other unattractive things?

There were more fish swimming around in the tangled crystals, their fins occasionally breaking the silvery surface of the liquid. Some of them were as big as the vicious magma fish! Though still tiny compared to him, of course. These, at least, seemed more interested in hiding from Jazz than trying to nibble on him. “Guess that makes you the smart fish,” he said as he sniffed his way through the weeds. If there was anything else in them, it was hiding really well.

He gave up looking at the crystals when the gallium caught in his minimal fur solidified. Slipping back into the pool to warm back up, Jazz turned his attention to the ceiling. 

It looked like the sky. Thousands and thousands of little dots of light glowed steadily in the darkness, only where real starlight usually appeared white, these were blue. Below those lights, glistening in the light of Unfairness’ glow-rocks, Jazz saw thousands of shining droplets, hanging on strings made of more droplets, all perfectly still and clear like the world’s most intricate glass sculpture.

Jazz curled up and watched the lights, wondering when Unfairness would be back.

Sleep found him first.

With no reason to wake up, Jazz wasn’t sure how long he slept for, but he was sure he was sleeping longer than he ever would have at home. But there was stuff to  _ do  _ at home! Games to play, kobolds to manage, patrols to run, and a brother to do it all with. Here… nothing really moved or changed. Except—

Jazz stirred to a steady, rhythmic  _ chirrrr-rup, chirrrrr-rup _ sound echoing through the chamber. The acoustics of the rough space made it hard to figure out where it was coming from, so he kept still and listened. It was on “his side” of the cave; was it near the pool or over by the walls?

He swiveled his ears to try and get a better pinpoint on the sounds and… they stopped. Gone? Or was the singer just skittish? Jazz didn’t move, waiting to see if it would start up again.

It took several breems, during which Jazz tried to focus on what could be making that sound and not how hungry he was, but eventually, it did.  _ Chirrr-rup. Chirrr-rup! _

This time, Jazz tried moving his ears veeeeeeeery sloooooowly. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was fairly close. He didn’t want to scare it away again; he wanted to know what it was! Was it over in the crystal weeds? He almost gave up, because there was no way he’d be able to see anything in there without getting up to look, and then it’d go silent again. But while he contemplated whether or not to try and look anyway, he finally spotted a… thing made from tarnished brass and cogs perched on a rock. 

_ Found you,  _ he thought at it. Sitting like it was, he could see its throat move in time with the sounds. The rest of it was perfectly still, its large optics seeming to stare off into space.

Jazz watched it for… a while. It was a nifty little thing. He wasn’t sure he’d call it “cute”, but… there were parts of it that reminded him of the kobolds. Some sort of rudimentary, precursor form of the kobolds maybe? But that made him wonder if he could talk to it. Kobolds… weren’t really  _ intelligent, _ but they talked. Well enough. 

Knowing there was every chance he’d just scare it away, Jazz tried mimicking its song.  _ Chrr-ip? _

It reacted before he’d even finished making the sound, going silent and hopping with surprisingly long legs into the melted gallium and crystals, disappearing with a wet  _ plop! _

“Aww. Bye friend.” Jazz practiced the sound a few more times, but couldn’t get it quite right. Maybe he’d get lucky and it would come back at some point; it definitely wasn’t going outside. 

Awake now, Jazz lifted his head and looked around the cave for something to do. It was as devoid of options as before, almost offensively so. What did Unfairness  _ do _ all winter!?!

Restless, Jazz crawled out of the pool to explore again. He tried rearing up on his back legs for a better look at the ceiling this time. The glowy-glass-things hung down enticingly, and he wondered if he might be able to reach— 

“Ack!”

It was sticky! Sticky and  _ not _ made from glass! The gooey strands clung to him, wrapping around his horns and plastering clear gunk all over his face. He swiped at it with his hands, but only succeeded in spreading it around. It was awful! How was he supposed to get it off?

Immediately above him some of the glowing dots moved, first toward where he’d disturbed their not-glass droplet strings, then away, leaving a dark patch on the ceiling. 

Jazz ignored them, though it  _ was _ slightly interesting that the dots were moving. He tried swishing his face and claws in the gallium to rinse the yuck off, but it didn’t work. It reminded him of glue, which made him think he might need a solvent, but the molten metal wasn’t a solvent. Nothing here was a solvent.

Desperate, he tried scraping the gunk off on the floor, the crystals, even the walls, which were  _ cold!  _ None of it worked; all he got for his trouble were crystal bits and dust stuck to his face. He tried freezing it off, holding his hands against the wall until his fingers ached, but while it did become less sticky it didn’t get any less  _ stuck.  _ Hardened to his plating, there was no way to pick it off.

Feeling miserable, he returned to the pool to warm up. Ugh. It was in his mane too. Bleeeeh. Why was this stuff  _ heeere? _ Was it something the glowy lights made? Whyyyyy?

Jazz sulked for a while on the shelf, occasionally looking up at the lights that had betrayed him. The denser areas around the dark patch flickered and some of the lights turned off to move back where they’d come from, and in Unfairness’ glowing rock-lights Jazz could just barely see that each one was a tiny worm-like creature. 

Over the course of joors of definitely not sulking, they fully repopulated the blank area, crawling along the sheets and webs on the ceiling. Jazz watched them pull up the sticky mess he’d made of their not-glass droplet sculpture, then start re-making it, releasing new strands made of globs of the yucky glue. 

Only when the glue-sculpture was totally completed again did the worms turn their biolights back on and the galaxy of blue lights became peaceful, still, and seemingly undisturbed once more. 

Except Jazz still had glue on his face and hand. 

Frustrated, bored, and more frustrated, Jazz dozed off with his head mostly in the pool, turned so he wouldn’t glue himself to the shelf.

This time when his systems started to cycle back up, he fought it and tried to stay in recharge. There was no Ricochet, no warm bed, and no kobolds waiting with a bath and a bowl of geothermal energon waiting for him. He was in a cave that was warm only when compared to the absolute cold outside, hungry and hiding in a pool of gallium and covered in worm snot. Bleh.

Unfortunately, all he could manage was a couple of micro-naps before his systems refused further sleep and forced him into full wakefulness. That only brought his hunger into sharp focus, which was annoying. It wasn’t fair for his frame to insist he get up to fuel when there was nothing to consume!

He eyed the dead dumbfish and wondered if Unfairness would tell him to try and eat it. Yuuuuuck!

How long had it been? His chronometer had never come back online after the stormsplosion, but it had to have been several orns since the other dragon had left, right?  _ Right? _

Maybe there was a stash of… something in here Jazz had missed? He didn’t think so, but his frame was starting to ache from staying in the same position for so long, even if the little depression-bed was surprisingly comfortable. He crept up onto the bank of the pool, keeping his head ducked and his wings low and  _ away _ from the glowing betrayal worms in the ceiling. Their stupid snot-sculptures were still pretty, but Jazz did  _ not _ want to touch them again!

He was pleasantly surprised when some of the gunk actually wiped off on a stray crystal this time. Not completely wiped clean, but clean _ er.  _ The gallium wasn’t a solvent, but being submerged so long in the heat had broken the glue down a little.

New plan. He could explore again for fuel after he melted this slag off!

Face first he went back into the pool, this time deliberately diving to the bottom. The heat was coming up through the ground, so somewhere there was probably—

A crack!

He found the crack angling down into the rock down where the gallium was deepest. He didn’t feel much of a current, but it was definitely warmer inside the crack than the rest of the pool, so he settled there to wait.

Jazz knew how volcanic energon collectors worked. Ish. What he’d been taught in class, anyway. He understood that convection currents powered them and that the same thing was happening here: the cooler gallium sank down — maybe all the way down to a pool of magma! — where it was warmed, and then floated up to where it cooled again. What surprised him was that there were other crystals and critters living down here. He could feel them when he poked them with his nose, felt them scurry away through the liquid.

And yes! The goop was starting to melt off! 

Something nosed against his front horn. Jazz nudged it back, curious. It wasn’t moving away from him like everything else, but it  _ was  _ moving (which he took advantage of to rub off some of the melting yuck!). What was it? It felt like it was trying to wiggle through the crack but was too wide for the narrow opening. Jazz wished he could see through the silvery—

Ack! It had  _ teeth! _ Jazz noped out of there  _ fast,  _ remembering the bite on his tail. Maybe it was just a bigger dumbfish — though that would be bad enough — or maybe it was something worse. Either way, he wasn’t going to stick around and find out. He wasn’t food! 

But… what if it made it through the crack? Eeeeeek! All of Jazz’s plating shivered at the thought. He couldn’t  _ see _ through the gallium!

Pursued by imaginary monsters, Jazz swam to the surface and quickly climbed out of the pool. Most of the remaining goo came off against the crystals when he rubbed against them and he finally felt clean again, if not at ease. He would have to go back in there to sleep or he’d get too cold and burn up what fuel he had left, but there were Things. Things with teeth. Baths and beds and baths that were beds were not places that should have things with teeth!

Of course, that’s when his tank grumbled, letting him know it was empty. 

Still shaking off bits of gallium, Jazz paced around the cave in the hope of finding something, anything, to satisfy it. And if he was sniffling a little, well, that was just because of the glue residue. Not because everything was scary and uncomfortable and awful. It  _ sucked. _ It sucked sooo much. Why was this even a thing? Why did Unfairness even do this natural (mostly natural? Jazz wasn’t sure) cave thing? Just build a decent underground dwelling powered by a geothermal generator! Heat and food and safety… everything a dragon needed! 

Finding nothing, he inched back into the pool. He was starting to shiver from the cold, and he didn’t have the fuel to burn on keeping himself warm. 

Where was Unfairness? He wanted the big, floofy dragon back.

In an effort to keep himself safe from the things with teeth, Jazz curled up tightly on the shelf with his tail tucked up against his body, his wings folded in as close as they could get. It made him feel a little safer, at least, as long as he didn’t think about how little of a difference it actually made.

His dwindling energy made him tired, but the need for fuel kept him awake. It was horrible. If only there was something he could eat! He looked at the crystals at the pool’s edge, wondering if chewing on them would be harmless or poison him on top of being pointless. He couldn’t even think about catching a Moonbeam… whatever. A crystal bug. 

_ Should _ he eat the dumb magma fish he’d killed?

The thought made his tank rebel. He wasn’t even sure he  _ could. _ He’d eaten specialized solid material pellets — mostly plastic but also metal formulas — when sick to help his self repair, but those were properly processed, not… raw bugs. 

Only if Unfairness didn’t come back, he decided. Only if he absolutely had to.

He pulled his head fully under the surface of the pool. It was dark and opaque, but maybe that’d help him rest. 

Whether he actually slept or not he wasn’t sure. He was definitely floating in and out of awareness, but each time he “woke up” it wasn’t the cycling up he associated with true recharge. It was more like his processor temporarily found something to focus on: the  _ chirrr-rup  _ of the hopping critter, the scrabbling of something or other in the crystals across the cave, the  _ whoosh  _ of the airlock… 

The—!

Jazz wanted to pop his head up and look, but all he managed was a slow, tired movement. The gallium sloughed from his optics and he saw Unfairness already there, taking off his armor. He had a pair of bottles hanging from — Jazz guessed — a string on his neck because they were half-buried in his fur. 

Unfairness noticed Jazz looking at him, and he detached one of the bottles and set it down in front of him at the edge of the pool. Then he started checking on the lights and the eggs. 

Jazz ignored him, grabbing the bottle like his life depended on it. Sure enough, there was energon inside, and the sound he made at the first taste of it was sad and desperate and pathetic and he Did Not Care. He also drank it way too quickly, but by the time he was trying to lick the very last droplets from the glass, he had a full tank and felt re-energized. 

When he looked around for the other dragon again, Unfairness had moved on to slicing open the dumbfish with his claws and licking the congealed energon. Eugh. Jazz made a face, then realized that was probably offensive (even if what Unfairness was doing was already offensive) and deliberately adopted a more neutral expression. “It bit me,” he informed him. 

Unfairness looked him over. “They come up tae eat the eggs,” he informed him. He tilted his head. “They usually don’t bite ye until they’re bigger.” 

“How much bigger can they get and still get into the pool?” Jazz asked nervously. “I’ve got holes in my tail from its teeth.”

“I made sure tae block the crack as much as feasible during the summer.” Unfairness shrugged his floofy shoulders and set the second bottle down at the edge of the crystal growths, then started to crawl into the pool with Jazz. At first, his fur was cold, cold enough to freeze the gallium around him, but he warmed up into a heater-blanket quickly. “The ones that can get in should nae be dangerous tae us.” 

“I hope not.” Jazz burrowed into the floof, angling himself to put Unfairness between him and whatever else was lurking in the deep. “Why keep the eggs here if those things eat them?”

“The caves that dinnae have predators are like the other one: they can fail sometimes. Predators or exposure. It’s a risk either way.” 

A risk that he mitigated by splitting the eggs up. That made sense now, but if there were that many eggs, there had to be lots more savage dragons, so, “Why not just keep them in your nests then?”

“I’m a long patroller. It’s my job.” Unfairness licked Jazz’s mane, combing and cleaning it, then licked his face, cleaning the last traces of the mucus from his plating.

“But why?” 

“Crecheling,” the dragon said with audibly thin patience, “an engineer, a builder, a warrior, or a creche-watcher — or the crechelings themselves — cannae survive the winter out here.”

“I don’t understand how  _ anything  _ survives the winter out here,” Jazz grumbled. “But why bring the eggs out here instead of back where the engineers,” which, if they had those, why were the caves so underdeveloped? “and the rest are?”

“Because it’s  _ cold. _ And there are things that’ll go into the hibernal dens and eat the eggs if they’re there. No one’s awake tae protect them.” 

“Wh—  _ no one?!”  _ That was ridiculous! “Who maintains the generators and repairs the tunnels and builds the newling frames if everyone’s asleep?!”

“The generators and tunnels are perfectly fine, just covered in snow. They’ll keep until spring. And the newling frames… they’re right there,” Unfairness pointed with his wing at the Forbidden Zone where the eggs in their sand nest were.

“They’re…” There was only one way that made sense. “They’re inside the eggs?”

“Of  _ course _ they are.” 

Suddenly Unfairness’ protectiveness made  _ so  _ much sense. Newling frames took a lot of time and effort to build, and before ensparking they required very careful handling. Damage to them could make it impossible for a spark to take hold, and it wasn’t always possible to figure out what the problem was and repair it for the following vorn — assuming the failing spark faded quietly without burning out all the circuitry. The smooth, decorated surface must be a… a shell of sorts. Or armor. Newling armor! To protect the helpless, inert frames from dumbfish and other things that could damage them.

“I’ll kill any dumbfish that try to eat them,” Jazz said, the end of his tail swishing through the gallium. “But… hold on, if the newling frames are already in there, that means you had them all finished before winter even started.”

Unfairness finished licking Jazz’s face clean and started down his mane, combing out the tangled strands. Even if they didn’t floof up the way he obviously expected them to. “Of course,” he answered, between licks, like building newling frames (and encasing them in “eggs”) in the summer wasn’t one of the weirdest things he’d ever heard. 

And it  _ was  _ weird.

“We only just have ours started by the beginning of winter,” Jazz said, his processor boggling at the logistics of it. Maybe that was why Unfairness had only done the bare minimum to improve the cave — there wasn’t time for anything else.

Unfairness huffed and didn’t comment. He just switched from grooming Jazz to grooming himself, untangling his own fur. It was less matted than Jazz’s mane had been from his repeated trips in and out of the pool (and from the worm snot!) but Unfairness had a lot more of it. 

“You’re so weird.”

_ “I’m _ nae the one who ended up half-buried in a snowdrift without any fur,” the dragon grumbled. 

“That wasn’t  _ my  _ fault! The ground exploded and the snow attacked me when I was just doing my job!”

“I’d feel more sympathy for ye if yer job weren’t tae patrol and keep us out of  _ our _ territory.”

Ack. Jazz curled in on himself slightly. “I never said I was on patrol.”

“I’m no ‘dumbfish’, crecheling.” Unfairness licked Jazz’s ear. “All the long patrollers in all the clans know a southern patroller’s armor, even if ye don’t range out this far.”

He’d known the whole time. He’d known since he found him in the snow, and he’d saved him anyway. Jazz hid his face in the other dragon’s fur. “Thank you.”

The dragon whuffled gently and licked Jazz’s neck. 

“But…” he shouldn’t say it, he really shouldn’t say it, but, “it’s not your territory. That’s why the Wall is there.”

Unfairness growled. “Ye  _ put _ it there because ye  _ took _ it. It’s  _ ours. _ Praxus is twenty degrees from the Zlif star cluster’s current position in all directions.”

Twenty degrees from what now? Jazz could read longitude and latitude on a map of Cybertron itself, but not in relation to anything in space. “How does that even work?”

Unfairness sighed. “The Zlif star cluster is at rotational north right now. Using it as a marker, ye can calculate when it is twenty degrees off from straight up.  _ That _ is the border of Praxus.” Jazz could practically hear him tack on an unspoken  _ not yer stupid wall. _

“But wouldn’t that mean the border moves? Borders can’t move.”

That earned him a scolding nip on the ear. “There are twenty-six different astronomical phenomena that sit, however temporarily, at rotational north, which they do at the same time every vorn.”

“Ow! Okay, so it doesn’t move. Somehow.” Because that made no sense and Jazz was getting a headache trying to picture it. 

“It’s a  _ basic _ latitudinal calculation,” Unfairness scoffed. “The hard part is memorizing the list o’ stars and their corresponding dates. Long patrollers are among the few who memorize the entire list.”

“Well I — we — didn’t even know there was a list. Or a… Praxus?” What was that, a clan? A group of clans? Unfairness had said there was more than one. “The only border in the north is the Wall.”

The other dragon nipped Jazz’s ear again. “Yer ancestors knew, crecheling.” Jazz whined and tried to twist his head out of Unfairness’ reach. He failed. “They came as an army, ready tae conquer and they built their wall tae keep us out when the clans rallied and met them with force and they could nae conquer further. That land is Praxus.” 

Unfairness released Jazz’s ear and settled his head into the carved out space in the rock for it, briefly rubbing Jazz’s horns and face with the short fuzz of his own. “There are elder dragons in the southern clans who remember being told as crechelings tae fly north tae their kin clans as their adults fought tae keep ye from burning their solar fields and wind turbines…” 

Jazz lay still, for once not asking any more questions. Most of the ones he had were for the dragons back home anyway. So much for the crazed, barbaric savage dragons who roamed the northern wastes like wild animals. Why was that all he’d ever heard about them? 

…he should probably stop thinking of Unfairness as a scary monster. “Hey,” Jazz asked softly, “what’s your name?”

“Hmmm?” the dragon asked sleepily, apparently dozing off. “Prowl,” he said after a moment.

Prowl, huh? It kind of suited him, Jazz decided. Even if he was still unfair. “I’m Jazz,” he offered, wondering if Prowl was even awake to hear him.

“Alright,” the dragon murmured. He shifted, and Jazz’s head was briefly pushed gently down into the depression by a furry wing. “Now go tae sleep, crecheling.” 

Hey! “Not a crecheling.”

Prowl just snorted. Then snored.

He wasn’t going to use his name at all, was he? Jazz let out a huff and closed his optics. He had a full tank again, and that meant he actually could sleep for now to pass the time until Prowl woke up again.

.

.

.

end


End file.
